Wage with fortune an eternal war,
Checked by the scoff of Pride, by Envy’s frown,
And Poverty’s unconquered bar.
Of such men was Samuel Crompton, the inventor of the spinning mule, whose mechanical achievement may be said to have laid open the prospect of unbounded wealth to the industrious of his native shire, and to have wrought in Lancashire changes well-nigh as wondrous as any recorded in the fictions of Eastern romance.
HALL-I’-TH’-WOOD.
Hall-in-the-Wood, or Hall-i’-th’-Wood, according to the vernacular, the ancient dwelling-place in which Crompton spent his toilsome days and thoughtful nights—the shrine to which our present pilgrimage is directed, and which deserves to be hallowed as one of our sacred temples—is situated in the midst of scenery strangely at variance with the associations the name calls forth; for though, with Firwood, the Lower Wood, the Oaks, and other places of similar designation immediately adjacent, it recalls the sylvan beauty of former days, so complete has been the disafforesting that, with the exception of the blighted and blackened relics of a sturdy oak or stately elm here and there dotting the landscape, scarce a remnant remains of the old forest that once formed its pleasant environment. Yet withal, if the surroundings have lost much of their picturesqueness and are not altogether lovely, they are under their present aspect far more suggestive of the manufacturing enterprise, the permanent utility, and the universal good which is the natural outcome of Crompton’s invention, than they would have been had they retained their pristine beauty. Nature has been effectually displaced by industry. From the steep cliff on which stands his ancient home a thousand tall chimneys may now be seen, filling the atmosphere with volumes of thick dun-coloured smoke that hang like a pall and drop down soot instead of fatness. The once fair and fertile country is absolutely covered with mighty factories and hives of busy industry, in which tens of thousands of the population find employment. On every hand the ear is assailed with the din and rattle of machinery, and wherever the eye can reach it encounters nothing but steam and smoke and the outward indications of active labour.